White House works to flip Obamacare narrative

Republicans on Tuesday kept up their attack on the troubled launch. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on FOX News accused the White House of trying to hide the “ugly things” in the law. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill that would require weekly reports on the exchanges.

And House Republicans wanted to know why they weren’t getting a briefing.

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“Far too much information about Obamacare’s rollout is being concealed from the public,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) . “All members – as well as the American people – deserve answers for this debacle.”

Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced HHS was bringing in more help for the HealthCare.gov website, including former acting OMB chief Jeff Zients, a veteran of top management firms, as well as “additional experts and specialists drawn from within government, our contractors, and industry, including veterans of top Silicon Valley companies.”

Her statement didn’t give details or identities. The administration’s Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and some presidential Innovation Fellows also will help with the repair effort.

HHS also said that it had secured “additional staff and commitments from our contractors,” including CGI.

USA Today reported late Monday that Verizon would join the team. The company declined to comment but public records show its subsidiary, Terremark, had a CMS contract to work on cloud computing services. The contract was renewed in September.

Other likely topics at the Thursday Energy and Commerce hearing include a focus on the Oracle software component that helps with identity verification, said the source. Previous reports indicate the website may have had trouble working with Oracle software, which blocked users from registering. Oracle has denied that its software is to blame. The company declined requests for comment, but said previously that its software “is the identical product deployed in most of the world’s most complex systems.”

Other expected questions relate to the project timeline and incomplete testing. Lawmakers are expected to ask why the system did not undergo end-to-end performance testing before it opened to the public and probe more on the time frame of the contracts.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services did not hand over final technical requirements until this May, the source said, which slowed down the process. For some contractors, such as CGI, a third of the work had to be redone. CMS disputes that it waited until late spring to provide important information.

Other decisions were made late in the process, according to information gathered by the House oversight committee. The administration told contractors one month before HealthCare.gov went up to make consumers register before they see prices, the committee found. The idea of getting through the clunky registration process before seeing prices has been blamed for the poor customer experience.

Supporters of the health law argue that they wanted consumers to see their tax subsidies before they got to the “sticker” price of a new insurance plan. They feared people would back off from buying insurance based on the sticker price if they didn’t see the subsidy.

Republicans on the committee say the information suggests that the White House made political decisions to hide prices instead of industry “best practices.”

“We are concerned that the administration required contractors to change course late in the implementation process to conceal Obamacare’s effect on increasing health insurance premiums,” Issa and other Republicans wrote in a letter to Steve VanRoekel, the chief information officer, and Todd Park, the chief technology officer, at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The letter was also signed by Subcommittee Chairmen John Mica, James Lankford, Jim Jordan and Blake Farenthold.

The Issa letter relies on information CGI provided to the committee in January and October. The Republicans say CGI officials repeatedly referred to the White House in its testimony — a sign, they say, that the president’s top advisers played central roles in the development of the website.